The Italian Girl

by Iris Murdoch

  There was a sound behind me. As I let Flora go, setting her as it were gently upon her feet, I was aware without turning my head that David Levkin was standing in the doorway. Then there was a furious dishevelled flurry like a wild cat escaping from a room, and Flora had darted past Levkin out of the door. Levkin closed the door behind her and stood looking at me. I sat down on the bed and covered my face with my hands.

  11. A Modern Ballet

  Now with one hand I controlled my heart which was striking my side like a desperate animal. With the other I smoothed back my hair and rubbed my face over. I felt as if my face must have altered, must have become distorted with chagrin and shame. For a moment I was hardly aware of Levkin.

  When my breathing was calmer and I had rubbed my face into some sort of order, I looked up at him. He was in the same attitude by the door, one hand on the door handle, the other holding up his white unbuttoned shirt at the neck. The broad full lips were soft and amused, but the eyes had almost vanished in wrinkles of sardonic wariness.

  At last he said, ‘Well, Uncle Edmund, how is it with you?’

  I stared at him in silence and he moved a little nervously away from the door, placing a chair between myself and him. ‘Well, Uncle, what price Sir Galahad now, what price Saint Edmund the Confessor –?’

  ‘So it was you,’ I said.

  ‘It was me. Lucky, lucky me.’

  ‘Otto trusted you.’ I spoke softly. I was aware now of the blessed rage within me, a sacred rage purging my shame. ‘He trusted you, and –’

  ‘Lord Otto is deaf and blind. He has other fish to fry. As for you, why should I submit to you? Why should I not draw your blood a little? You were so beautifully caught, Uncle Edmund, were you not? But no – you shall reproach me. Speak daggers, daggers, I deserve it!’ He laughed, and with a dramatic gesture threw wide his shirt which was unbuttoned to the waist. Then he moved, swinging the chair with him, as I rose to my feet.

  ‘You don’t seem to know what you’ve done –’ I choked over the words. I wanted to cover him with leeches and scorpions, I wanted to make him cringe and whimper.

  He skipped before me like a bland gay child. ‘Oh, but I do, I do! What does it say in the gospels? “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” I am that man, I am that man!’ He gabbled the quotation delightedly. ‘But what else does it say in the gospels, dear Uncle? “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”’ He danced gleefully behind his chair, edging a little towards the window.

  ‘You must leave this house,’ I said. This at least was something I could impose upon him. ‘I can’t think how you can have the impertinence to remain here after –’

  ‘Uncle, Uncle no coarse language – remember, we are in a lady’s boudoir!’ He dodged back again towards the door, still interposing the chair between us. As he moved, he picked up something white from the bed, flourished it in front of me and then half buried his face in it, peering at me over the top. I saw that what he held was Flora’s white flimsy nightdress. I began to tremble.

  ‘Fair flowers and ripe berries, dear uncle. We like them both, don’t we, we enjoy them both. And when we fall we know where we like to fall. Why even you – or do I wrong you, Uncle dear! Perhaps you don’t really like girls? Perhaps you prefer boys delicious milk-white boys as beautiful as angels? But no – you don’t really like anything at all, Uncle, not anything at all. And that is why you hate us, you hate to see us at it. Isn’t that it, Uncle Edmund?’ He spoke softly, peering at me now through a fringe of brown hair, his body immobile and taut, ready to leap.

  I didn’t raise my voice. ‘Go away, Levkin, or I shall probably hit you.’ I was beginning to be frightened of the anger.

  He half turned the door handle behind him, but he seemed delighted, fascinated by his power to enrage me. ‘Hit me then, beat me! If a man strike you on one cheek offer him the other. I offer you both cheeks, Uncle. I offer you – Ah!’

  I moved slightly and he half opened the door, ready to dart out. His face was bland, broad, flattened with smiling mockery, his eyes were two gleaming exultant arcs. The nostrils arched with happy impertinence.

  He went on softly, ‘And yet why should I consent to be chastised by you? Old rhino, old rhino! Oh yes, I was listening to it all at the door! I only came in because I could not see through the keyhole. And you were worth seeing, Uncle, you were! Here, take this. You might enjoy this, pawing it over in your stable!’ He threw the nightdress into my face.

  I slapped the lacy stuff to the ground with one hand and reached for him with the other. My fingers touched his shirt as he eluded me, flying past and springing lightly on to the bed. He lifted the chair, pointing the legs towards me.

  ‘Ah, not here, not here,’ he said softly. His dishevelled shirt had partly emerged from his trousers and he was panting with excitement. ‘Not in Flora’s pretty room with all her little things. This is no place to play at rhinos. Outside if you will. But make no mistake, I can wrestle and I would defend myself. Perhaps it would be delightful. But no, no. The one who will kill me will be Otto. And when that time comes I shall not resist him.’

  I took one of the legs of the chair and pulled it away from him. Fortunately he let it go easily and then stood before me on the bed, slowly spreading his arms in an attitude of defenceless submission. The hot moment passed.

  I felt incoherent, disgusted, wretched, I loathed him, I loathed myself. I wanted to end the scene cleanly somehow. I said, ‘I won’t tell Otto, but you must clear out.’

  ‘I will go when I am ready,’ he said. ‘My sister is well here. And do you want to drive Lord Otto insane? Oh, Edmund, Edmund, how I enjoy you! You are a buffoon just like your brother, but you don’t even know it! He at least, he knows that he is a perfectly ludicrous animal.’

  ‘I won’t tell Otto,’ I said, ‘but I will tell Isabel. And now –’

  He laughed outrageously. ‘Oh, Isabel! She! No, no, it is too beautiful. No, she will tell you things, poor rhino, poor ox, she will goad you, she will drive you in harness! But I was forgetting, you are the Health Visitor, the General Inspector! Well, you shall know, you shall know. Yes, come and see Isabel. She will tell and tell.’

  He gave a great leap from the bed and as he went by he tapped me lightly on the chest. I subsided abruptly into a chair. I could hear him now on the landing calling ‘Isabel! Isabel!’

  12. Isabel Confesses

  Isabel locked the door behind me and turned the gramophone down a little. ‘What was David shouting about?’ She looked plump and dishevelled in a shabby blue silk dressing-gown with the sleeves rolled up. She looked crumpled, sleepy, vague, a bit frightened. Perhaps she had been lying down. ‘What is it Edmund? You look rather mad too.’ She stared at me. Intimations of Wagner rumbled in the background.

  ‘Flora’s back,’ I said. I looked down at Isabel and felt myself indeed down-like and gaping.

  ‘I know. Whatever has David been doing to you, Edmund? He pushed you in through the door like a dog! No, you sit down, I’ll stand. I can’t sit still these days, I’m too nervous.’

  I sat down on a fat embroidered stool which yelped under me. The high bright coronet of the wood fire subsided, bringing a musty fragrance and such a blaze of warmth in my back that I had to edge away. The room flickered with golden light. Isabel wandered among the furniture like a distraught nymph waist-deep in the reeds. She caressed her two forearms vigorously. The blue dressing-gown caught at surfaces and edges and she plucked it away with jerks of the knee.

  ‘Isabel, do you know about Flora?’

  ‘So you feel it your duty to tell me?’

  ‘So you know?’

  ‘That Flora was pregnant? Oh yes, yes.’

  ‘And did you, do you, know who it was that made her so?’

  ‘Yes. David Levkin. He’s probably listening at the door at this moment.’ She moved across and picked up
a log of wood. The dry powdery bark dusted her sleeve and floated in the air.

  ‘But Isabel, you tolerated him in the house –’ I sneezed violently. The bark was like pepper.

  ‘How Victorian you are, Edmund. How could I turn him out? Besides the damage was done. Put that on the fire, would you.’

  ‘I can perfectly understand,’ I said, ‘that you should not have told Otto. Otto might go berserk. But oughtn’t you to have told Levkin to go? After all –’

  ‘Oh, do stop telling us what we ought to do. And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got a rather sensitive nose –’

  ‘Damn your nose. I know I rather encouraged you. You gave me a moment of hope. But it’s too much of a tangle really. Don’t ask any more, Edmund. It’s better not to know.’

  She kicked her way to the mantelpiece and surveyed herself in the mirror, absently tapping her wedding ring against the marble. Then she picked up a jar of cold cream and began to smooth it into the skin under her eyes with little patting movements.

  ‘I’ve seen too much already,’ I said. ‘I can’t shut my eyes now. You realize that Flora has got rid of the child?’

  Isabel moved impatiently and her gown brushed my knees. I got up hastily, trampled on the stool, and retreated to the other side of the rug.

  ‘You’ve broken it. Oh, you are a beastly clumsy animal. There’s no need to jump like that when I come near you. And how can you talk so crudely about Flora –’

  I felt agitated, exasperated, confused. Somehow it was all too scandalous, too outrageous. Levkin must be made to go, Flora must be made to realize what she had done, Isabel must be made to take some responsibility for the whole scene. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I find it all pretty shocking and surprising. And you seem to be taking it so calmly.’

  ‘Calmly!’ She gave a deliberate grimace of pain which transformed her face into a violent mask. She moved to the gramophone, turned it up for a moment to a deafening roar, and then lowered it till there was nothing but a distant beat. ‘Calmly!’ she said more softly with her back to me. ‘One is not calm on the rack. One is not calm in the fire. Oh, you are stupid. And I looked forward to you so much.’

  ‘Isabel, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t heal you, I’m not good enough. I’m in a muddle myself. I just feel there’s something here I don’t understand. Could you explain it to me, please?’ I was certainly following Levkin’s instructions to the letter.

  ‘Yes, me. You don’t understand me. And neither do I.’ She fell on her knees in front of the fire, closing her eyes against the great heat. ‘I’m the missing link.’

  I stared down at her. Her dark hair was unkempt, wispy, straying bleakly upon her neck. ‘How did you find out about Flora, anyway?’ I asked her.

  ‘David told me.’

  ‘What perfect effrontery! If Levkin –’

  ‘Do stop calling him Levkin. He’s practically one of the family. Oh, can’t you see, can’t you see? I feel it must be written on the walls of this room, written on my face, on my hands –’

  ‘What –?’

  ‘I love him, I love him, I love him –’

  ‘You mean –?’

  ‘David, yes, David. I love him, I’m crazy with love, overwhelmed, absolutely done for – Oh God!’ She suddenly rolled over on the floor at my feet and took a firm grip of one of my ankles.

  I stood paralysed and speechless with shock and suddenly nauseated as if some overpowering smell had entered the room. Levkin here too, Levkin everywhere. I was utterly surprised and shocked at Isabel’s words and her whole being was for a moment repugnant. I began to mumble and pull myself away.

  ‘Yes, I love him.’ She let go, still lying there limp, face downward on the ground, her silky legs revealed. ‘I worship him. I want him, I want his child. I even wanted that child of Flora’s, the child she killed. If I could have had even Flora’s child to keep –’ Her voice became thick and trembling.

  I kicked the disabled stool aside and sat down heavily in a chair. I could not forget that Isabel had made an appeal to me, an appeal which had touched me to the heart although I had rejected it. Now I saw her for an instant as she lay on the floor as an abandoned woman, a harlot. I wanted to shake her, to interrogate her. ‘I suppose Otto doesn’t know this?’

  ‘No, of course not. I am still alive.’ Her voice came muffled through her hair.

  ‘How long –’

  ‘Ever since he came. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him in Otto’s workshop, or it might have been the next moment. It was like a lightning flash and everything becoming golden, like the end of the world. Oh, you can’t conceive what a lonely idiotic life I’ve led. I’ve seen no one for years except that monster Otto and those dreadful boys. I know it’s my own fault. I somehow wanted it all to be miserable and dreary so as to punish Otto and Lydia. But then when David came, it was a vision of life, it was like seeing an angel, it was like seeing a god. Can’t you see even now how beautiful he is? Can’t you at all imagine being in love with him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘oddly enough I can. But when you found he had – seduced Flora – surely –?’

  Isabel sat up and adjusted her gown over her knees. Her face was calmer and rather dreamily deliberate. She patted a log back into the fire. ‘I had him first, you see,’ she said softly.

  ‘But –’

  ‘He only took up with Flora because I tried to break with him. He did it to spite me.’

  ‘He – then – loved you?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wanted me. He found he could have me.’

  ‘You mean you actually –?’

  ‘Oh yes, Edmund, everything. Everything, everything, everything. And if we could have thought of more we would have done that too. Otto with the sister and I with the brother. Oh, it worked wonderfully!’ She turned to look at me now with a dreadful bold calm. Her face shone with a resigned, broken beauty.

  ‘Oh, Isabel –’

  ‘You’re scandalized.’

  I was scandalized, horrified. I was also, I had just realized, and the realization was sobering, jealous. I felt excluded. Yet surely I did not want to be inside such a circle of hell? ‘But you tried to break it off?’

  ‘Well, yes. Lydia was dying in the house, practically in the next room. I think I felt rather as Otto did. We both tried about the same time to break the – addiction. I felt sick with myself. Lydia suffering so dreadfully and all that at the same time. It was rotten. And of course I was scared absolutely stiff of Otto finding out. I am scared absolutely stiff.’

  ‘He’s got no notion?’

  ‘No. He can think of nothing but Elsa. It’s the first real relation he’s had with a woman in years, perhaps ever. It was never much good with me. They were both, for both of us, a godsend.’

  I hated hearing her talk like this. ‘But Isabel – honestly I am rather scandalized. These are – purely physical relationships –’

  ‘Oh, Edmund, Edmund, Edmund,’ she said wearily. She rose slowly, laboriously, like a stout elderly person. I rose too.

  ‘But what are you going to do now?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. Just go blindly on. We are both in the pockets of those changelings.’

  ‘You mean you would – re-establish relations with that boy – after Flora – ?’ I of Autun, the root of all evil. Isabel simply didn’t seem to know what she was doing.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve understood me, Edmund,’ said Isabel. ‘I am in love. I agree that this is a form of madness, but at least it’s a fairly well-known form. Or perhaps you don’t know about it? “An arrow in the side makes poor travelling, only not to run is a worse pain.”’

  ‘You are raving,’ I said. ‘Otto could so easily find out, and –’

  ‘I know. I feel like a ship moving steadily towards an iceberg. But I can no other. Don’t you see I’m in extremis? The only question is, when Otto finds out, will he kill David or me or both.’

&nb
sp; She looked so pale and small, her arms hanging limply by her sides, as if she were already pinned helplessly to a wall. I felt suddenly sorry, and frightened for her. She looked like a victim. ‘What can I do for you, Isabel?’

  ‘One thing. Take Flora away.’

  I half turned from her. The memory of my grapple with Flora came back with photographic clarity. That was the one rational thing which I could have done, protect Flora, and I had systematically and now completely made it impossible.

  ‘Yes, take her away, Edmund. She’s fond of you and she trusts you. Take her to your house. Her term isn’t starting yet and she simply mustn’t stay here. There’ll be some outrage. If she stays here, we shall all of us go mad.’

  As I listened to her tones of entreaty I thought of another thing. Levkin would certainly tell Isabel that he had seen me seizing Flora. I was filled with confused angry distress. ‘Can’t you help Flora yourself, Isabel?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. She loves him too. Flora will never forgive me between now and the end of her life. David told me he had made her pregnant. He returned to me, he came back to me with that confidence, with that simplicity. How can she ever forgive our having spoken of this together, consulted about her together? Don’t you know what the pride of a young girl is like? And the first time, the very first time. Ah, poor, poor child –’ Tears were coming to Isabel at last, big slow tears such as one can only weep for oneself when one pities oneself in the guise of another.

  ‘I agree Flora would be better out of the house. And then you –?’

  ‘And then I can get on with it? Well, that won’t be your affair, Edmund. You must leave Otto and me to our merry-go-round. You remember what I said about Saint Teresa’s cupboard in hell? You thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you –’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I will try and help. I’ll do what I can. I’m sorry I’m such a fool.’

  ‘That’s all right, Edmund. You’d better go now. Please look after Flora. And, Edmund –’